The Unicorn Read Free Page B

to one side. Alice does not need the contemplative life: she simply acts as if she saw by the light of the good without being aware of it.
     
But there are two personalities from the ordinary world through whose eyes we see everyone else in the appalling land. One is Effingham Cooper, whom in the end we dismiss, and the other is Marion Taylor, their viewpoints alternating very symmetrically through the book. Her summing up is more complex than Effingham’s: ‘she did not know whether the world in which she had been living was a world of good or of evil, a world of significant suffering or a devil’s shadow-play, a mere nightmare of violence.’ Whatever it had been, it left her able to appreciate Alice, as is immediately said ‘dear, solid, real, ordinary Alice. Good Alice.’ And she, unlike Effingham, goes back from the appalling land ‘to the real world’ a little changed, since she came knocked off balance by an inconclusive love affair with her friend Geoffrey, and goes back to ‘dance’ at his wedding to another friend of hers.
     
Marian’s relation to Hannah has naturally not been one of Courtly Love like Effingham’s, a vision of beauty. It has been rather the gradual discovery of something which she regards initially as morbid, the story which somewhat recalls T. S. Eliot’s Family Reunion and Harry’s pursuit by the Furies because he does not know to what degree he was responsible for his wife’s death overboard from a ship. Hannah cannot like Harry flee the Furies, though her guilt in relation to her husband exactly parallels Harry’s: instead her husband keeps her confined, watched by Gerald Scottow, whom Marian at one point thinks ‘the centre from which the furies came.’ Denis Nolan tries to persuade Marian that Hannah has ‘made her peace with God’, but this means little to Marian who sums it up for Effingham as ‘Hannah took to religion, or the spiritual life or whatever the hell it is, like someone taking to a drug. She had to.’ And indeed the idea that Hannah has peace with God has already been fairly disproved by the ‘possessive savagery ‘ with which she speaks of Denis: ‘I think he would let me kill him slowly’, and is presently to be disproved again by the hysterical pain which, conversely, Denis elicits from her when he sings Charles Dalmon’s song, ‘O what if the fowler my blackbird has taken’. It is this outburst which persuades Effingham to help Marian in her direct action to kidnap Hannah and take her forcibly from her seclusion. It seems to be this action, which fails disastrously, that prompts, although we never quite know, Gerald’s possession of Hannah and all that follows from it.
     
Disastrous failure though Marian’s interposition proves to be, the Freudian explanations which lie behind it may have their validity: anyone interested may be referred to Antonia Byatt’s excellent discussion in her book about Iris’s earlier novels, Degrees of Freedom. There are alternative explanations in terms of the thought of Simone Weil, which Byatt also discusses. Max Lejour sums them up to Effingham in a way which relates Hannah more plausibly perhaps to the good than the simple sense of her as beautiful. Hannah, whether she was guilty of the attempted murder of her husband or not, has become his victim.
     
Recall the idea of Até which was so real to the Greeks. Ate is the name of the almost automatic transfer of suffering from one being to another. Power is a form of Ate. The victims of power, and any power has its victims, are themselves infected. They have to pass it on, to use power on others. This is evil, and the crude image of the all-powerful God is a sacrilege. Good is not exactly powerless. For to be powerless, to be a complete victim, may be another source of power. But good is non-powerful. And it is in the good that Ate is finally quenched, when it encounters a pure being who only suffers and does not attempt to pass the suffering on.
     
Hannah’s